Robotics & Embodied AI
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Pudu Robotics Robots + $150M Series: 120,000 units shipped, now pivoting to embodied AI
Shenzhen-based Pudu closed nearly $150M yesterday at a $1.5B+ valuation, co-led by Longgang Financial Holding and Ya Capital. Cumulative funding tops $300M. The story isn’t the round — it’s that a company best known for restaurant robots just became this week’s marquee Chinese embodied-AI bet. The robots you can actually buy Pudu ships a real… Continue reading
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A Vancouver startup put self-driving pods in two real airports — not a pilot, actual revenue service. A&K Robotics closed an $8M CAD Series A on April 21, led by BDC’s Industrial Innovation Fund and Vantage Futures, to scale from dozens to hundreds of Cruz Pods a year out of a new Surrey, BC plant.
What the hardware actually is A&K Robotics Cruz Pod is a small electric indoor passenger pod. Tap a destination on the touchscreen, sit down, it drives itself through crowds using 360° lidar, cameras, sonar, and A&K’s own Kinesos AI motion planner. Live today at Vancouver International (YVR) and Madrid-Barajas — the latter run by Aena,… Continue reading
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title: “Tesla Optimus Giga Texas 10M-Unit Factory: Musk kills the Model S line to build humanoids” Tesla’s Q1 call on April 22 turned into a factory-conversion announcement. Elon confirmed a 5.2M sq ft addition to Gigafactory Texas, $500M–$1B of capex, and a stated target of 10 million Optimus units per year. The Model S/X line… Continue reading
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Path Robotics Rove + HII HYPR Program: America’s largest shipbuilder bets on a four-legged welder
On April 16, Path Robotics launched Rove — a quadruped robot with a welding head on top, running the company’s Obsidian Physical AI model. Four days later, Huntington Ingalls Industries (biggest U.S. shipbuilder, the one that builds aircraft carriers and submarines) named it the centerpiece of HYPR, a new line stitching welding, material handling, surface… Continue reading
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Roborock Saros 20 Sonic launches globally with a 7.98cm chassis and an open API your Home Assistant agent can actually call
Roborock’s 2026 flagship robot vacuum hit shelves in April, and r/Roborock has been at war with the Dreame X60 Max Ultra camp ever since. Vacuum Wars crowned it Best Robot Vacuum of 2026. TechRadar slotted it into their “two products we’re most excited about” pick. What’s in the box A wet-and-dry robot vacuum with one… Continue reading
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Innok Robotics INDUROS family + Innok Cockpit: 1.3-tonne outdoor AMRs that talk VDA-5050
A German AMR maker most US readers haven’t heard of just had its strongest quarter ever. Innok Robotics is using Hannover Messe 2026 (Hall 26, G44(9), April 20–24) to roll out the full INDUROS family — 350s, 700, 700s, 1300 — plus a new browser-based fleet manager called Innok Cockpit. There’s also a “Physical AI”… Continue reading
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Vention Rapid Operator AI ships from GTC 2026 with 99% first-pick on 24-inch deep bins
Vention turned the demo highlight of NVIDIA GTC 2026 into a SKU you can actually order. Rapid Operator AI is a turnkey bin-picking robot cell — robot arm on a pedestal, two-finger gripper, stereo vision camera, MachineMotion AI controller, operator HMI — sold as one box. Up to 99% first-pick on randomly-oriented parts in bins… Continue reading
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Advantech MIC-735 AI Inference System puts NVIDIA IGX Thor inside a ruggedized AMR brain
Advantech released the MIC-735 on April 9 and quietly set the bar for industrial edge AI boxes in 2026. This is not a dev kit — it is a sealed, rugged inference system meant to bolt inside a forklift, an AMR, or a surgical robot and run the full perception stack on-device. What’s in the… Continue reading
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Telefónica T_Space Drone-as-a-Service: a phone company is now flying the drones for you
Telefónica skipped selling drones and is selling drone missions instead. T_Space is the first end-to-end Drone-as-a-Service run entirely by a telco — the carrier owns the fleet, the 5G uplink, the MEC edge nodes, and the AI vision stack. You file a job, they fly it. The hardware This isn’t a SaaS dashboard with a… Continue reading
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Ericsson takes delivery of the first humanoid with Realbotix Vinci AI Vision System
On April 8, 2026, Realbotix shipped its first Vinci-equipped robot to Ericsson. Vinci is a patented vision module with micro cameras hidden inside the robot’s irises — not clipped on, not a headset, embedded in the eyeballs of its David, M-Series, and Aria humanoids. What the hardware actually does The in-eye cameras feed a vision… Continue reading
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